Landing in 2016 the crew of the Waverider was a little surprised to find that it was very dark outside the front windows of the ship. Sara had programmed the jump to land in the present time, which she didn't think would've been too long after receiving Barry's message.
"Gideon, what time is it here?" She asked the AI as she and the rest of the crew disengaged the restraints of their seats and shook off whatever time-travel effects a very few of them still occasionally suffered from.
"The current time is 3:24 a.m., on the morning of December 25th 2016." Gideon chirped in reply. Sara was admittedly a little surprised to hear that answer, she had known it was well past present time midnight when she got the message but she hadn't realized it was THAT late.
"Barry sent us a distress call in the middle of the night?" Ray questioned, this was starting to look more and more like a trap with each passing minute.
"The message was sent at approximately 3:12 local time, so yes." Gideon answered and if an Artificial Intelligence Unit could be frustrated, this one certainly was.
"Ok here's the plan," Sara began, not really in the mood to get in the middle of a potential argument between Ray and the computer. "There are seven of us, five of us are going in, any volunteers to stay behind?" She asked but the others only looked around at each other, wondering who among them would cave first.
"Why does anybody need to stay behind?" Nate questioned when it looked as though no one was going to volunteer for the job, but he certainly didn't want to do it.
"Because," Sara said as she met his eyes, "Before you and Amaya joined us we were on a mission where we flew right into a trap. Part of the reason we made it out alive, most of us, was that some of us stayed behind." She explained. Everyone, even the team's new members, caught her use of the term "most of us" but no one dared comment on it. Instead Mick simply raised his hand.
"I'll stay," he offered, "I can only take so much of those S.T.A.R. Lab geeks and last month was more than enough."
"I'll stay too," Amaya volunteered, earning slightly surprised looks from everyone except for Mick; he just looked plain annoyed. "These are your friends, if someone's going to stay behind it should be someone they don't know very well." She reasoned and so with no objections coming from anyone, not even from Mick, Sara nodded in acceptance of the arrangement.
"Ok," she agreed before pointing a finger between the two staying on the ship and leveling a stern glare with each of them. "But if we get back and either of you is dead or seriously hurt, there will be consequences." She warned, "One of us will text you if things turn out all clear."
With that said those going into the building they were currently docked in the parking lot of began filing one by one off the bridge, leaving behind the two who had offered to stay behind in case things went south.
Going into S.T.A.R. Labs no one on the team of Legends had any idea what it could be that they might walk into. They took it as a good sign when Barry's voice came over the speaker to buzz them in, not that the door was sufficiently locked but the action still made everyone feel a little bit better. It wasn't until they saw Barry waiting for them in front of the elevator once they reached the bottom floor that they were totally able to relax, you know as much as they could while still not knowing what exactly was going on.
Barry's eyes went to straight to Sara once the elevator door opened, his hands already wringing together anxiously as all the words he possibly could say fumbled around in his head.
"Hey," he greeted the team in very much the same awkward way he had greeted Kara when she discovered him and Cisco inside of her apartment.
"Hey, what's going on?" Sara demanded and while Barry did open his mouth words were not coming out of it.
"That's uh, that's what we're trying to figure out." He finally managed to say, and when he saw that the answer was not at all helpful he directed his attention solely onto Sara. "You might want to come alone for this," he said in a voice that was barely above a whisper, the look that the blonde gave him in response made it very clear that she wasn't in favor of that idea.
"Why?" She demanded in an icy voice, making Barry start to wonder if she were, in some ways, simply the female version of Oliver.
"Oliver's here," he finally said, by now he felt as though he could manage to get it out of his mouth that Laurel was also just down the hall, but even though doing so certainly would make this conversation easier Barry just didn't feel like it was his place. "Something happened in Star City, he came here to have Caitlin and Cisco run some tests." He told her and at the mention of Oliver resorting to help Sara's gaze seemed to soften, as she came to understand just how serious this mystery situation is.
"Ok," she agreed before looking back at the rest of her team, and then back at Barry. "But Ray comes with me," She said, "Oliver trusts him, so anything that he needs me for he can explain it in front of Ray."
Barry nodded, knowing that he wasn't going to be able to convince Sara to follow him alone and Laurel had known Ray so it wasn't like her sister would be walking in with a stranger.
"Ok," he agreed, with that he started walking away but Sara turned back to the others one last time before she and Ray followed.
"If we're not back in five minutes, come find us." She instructed.
"Will do," Nate promised and so with that all set Sara set off after Ray and Barry, to find what she had no idea.
"What do you think this is about?" Ray practically whispered in her ear as the two of them followed Barry down the long corridor.
"I have no idea," Sara replied, "But if Ollie came all the way from Star City to ask for help then it might be bigger than the Dominators."
Ray's eyes went wide for a minute, his mind trying to think up a scenario for a situation as dangerous as that. But not even his big brain could come up with a single theory for something worse than their entire planet being obliterated.
"That's a scary thought," he finally said and Sara hummed in agreement.
They walked in silence, a true achievement for Ray Palmer, for another minute or two before they reached the cortex. Sure enough Oliver Queen was standing in the middle of the room, saying something to Caitlin before they both turned to look at the new arrivals as they entered.
Sara stopped dead in her tracks just as she reached the doorway, her face completely blank as she stared ahead of her. She saw Ollie and she saw Caitlin, but her gaze was set dead onto the other woman standing right by their sides. It couldn't be, she had to be going crazy. She started wondering when the last time she slept was, or if maybe the Dominators had left something lingering in her brain even after escaping the pods.
"Laurel?" Ray's shocked voice cut through her thoughts, so at least if this was a vision in front of her he was seeing it to.
But it couldn't be a vision, not one left behind by the Dominators anyway. Barry, Cisco, and Caitlin hadn't been imprisoned on that ship but they could see her, right? Or had Ollie come her for testing because he thought he was losing his mind as well?
"Hi Ray," Laurel replied to her old friend before her eyes shifted back to her sister, "Sara."
Sara found herself swallowing a lump she hadn't even realized had been forming in her throat until now, when Laurel spoke and it sounded so real.
"You're, you're not real." The younger blonde said in protest to her thoughts, because this couldn't be real.
"She's real Sara," It was Caitlin who assured her, so that meant that the others could see her.
Sara finally snapped out of her trance when Oliver began to slowly approach her, the look on his face making it evident that he was having just as much difficulty believing this as her.
"We dug up the grave," he said, "And the body was a fake."
Fake.
That word had Sara taking just half a step back as she processed everything. Fake. The body in the casket was fake. Laurel wasn't dead, she was alive, and she was standing right here.
"And in case you're wondering," Cisco's voice spoke up from where he was seated at a computer; Sara had hardly even noticed he was there. "She is our Laurel, because we've been keeping very good tabs on Earth-2's version." He said, turning around the monitor before him and pressing a single key, displaying on the screen a live feed of one of the pipeline's prison cells with the image of another version of Laurel curled up in a fetal position as she slept.
Sara looked briefly at the screen, but she didn't need to see it. Her own mind could fool her, but not another version of her sister. No one could ever pose as Laurel and get it right. They couldn't imitate her stance, her tone, her eyes. There was only one Laurel in the multi-verse who could make all those things so familiar, Sara would bet her life on it, and that Laurel was standing right in front of her.
"I'll uh, I'll go tell the others not to come rushing down here." Ray said from where he still stood behind his captain, his words trigging those she had said to the rest of the team to flash through her mind. He was gone before she could thank him, not that it really mattered. Thanking Ray for remembering that the rest of the crew was about to come charging down to the cortex in maybe thirty seconds wasn't where Sara's focus currently was.
Instead it was on Laurel, her, by some miracle living, sister. With her brain finally beginning to turn back on she took a step forward, and then another. Once she passed Ollie Caitlin decided now might be a good time for her to back just half a step or so away from Laurel, able to see very clearly what it was that was about to happen. She was right, and the second that the younger of the Lance sister's made it past Oliver a smile broke out across her face and she all but charged the short distance into her sister's arms.
Laurel smiled a little at Sara's reaction to seeing her, and stumbled back slightly at the force of her younger sister's body slamming into hers. But she was quick to readjust herself and return Sara's hug. She hadn't really been expecting Sara's near python grip around her neck or the slight feeling of moisture creeping it's way onto the fabric of her jacket, but maybe she should have. She knew that everyone had believed her dead all these months, but confronting Ollie, a man known for not showing much emotion, and some allies she's never really known all that well, was vastly different than facing her little sister. She remembered when it was Sara who turned up alive after being dead. How everything she had felt ever since her death had come rushing back up to the surface the moment she saw her. Unfortunately with her it had almost all been anger, but with Sara it seemed to be a lot of grief. It showed Laurel all at once, without a single real word, just how much had changed in their relationship over the years. They had forgiven past mistakes and become closer for it. She knew this already, of course, but somehow the act of Sara actually crying over the fact that she thought her dead made it all the more real to Laurel.
The rest of the morning was spent running more tests than Sara normally would've cared to sit through, and she wasn't even the one being tested. However, most of the time, Laurel wasn't either. She had been put through the majority of her testing before they even called Sara, though she was still subjected to a few more blood draws and Vibes as Caitlin and Cisco tried to figure out how she had gotten to the other side of the world after her injury. The majority of the tests were being preformed on someone who would never speak a word of protest against it; the dummy. It was easy enough to figure what exactly what the thing was made out of, rubber on the outside and an extremely durable gelatin that is often used in weapons testing to assess bodily harm on the inside. The hard part was determining where in the hell it had come from. After hours of getting nowhere, and LONG after the rest of the Legends had left to do whatever it was they wanted for the holiday, Cisco finally called it quits. The freaky Jell-O Laurel, as he had called it, wasn't going to get up and walk away (yes, he did test to be sure it wasn't sentient) and he needed some sleep. Caitlin seconded that notion and Barry said that he was already late for Christmas with the West's. When Sara and Laurel brought up the idea to go pay a Christmas visit to their mother it was, surprisingly, met with only minimal resistance from Oliver. Even more surprising, after he finally gave in, he declared that he would not be going with them and would instead remain at S.T.A.R. Labs to take a nap on one of the medical cots.
"I've never known Ollie to take a nap, you know except for back in high school when slept through every class that he didn't skip." Sara joked as she and Laurel made their way through the streets of the city in Oliver's car, which he and Laurel had driven there in.
"Me either," Laurel admitted from the passengers seat, Sara was driving because after having not driven in seven months the older of the Lance sisters was a little worried about taking too sharp a turn or something of the sorts; she didn't want to die on her way to tell her mother she was alive. "But based on what he told me on the drive up here things have been pretty hectic lately, I hear you fought aliens?" She asked with a raised eyebrow and Sara laughed as she halted for a stop sign.
"You missed a lot sis," she teased and Laurel hummed in agreement.
"So what happened on your mission?" She asked, almost changing the topic completely.
"We beat Savage," Sara replied as she made their turn, "Now we're safeguarding time, which is a lot less boring than it sounds."
"I mean with you," Laurel clarified with a knowing smile, "You're different than you were when you left, happier." She observed and she also wasn't blind to the uncomfortable look that came across Sara's face before she steeled her features back into their usual state of no emotion.
"My sister just came back to life, of course I'm happy." She tried to cover with a suddenly forced smile and half amused laugh, but Laurel saw right through it.
"It's more than that," She pressed, "Something's changed inside of you."
Sara's face fell just a little bit as she thought about telling Laurel, although what she would tell her she really had no idea. Maybe she could tell her about living in the 50's and how it gave her control over her bloodlust; actually she probably should do that. But other things had changed her over the mission as well; such as losing the teammate she was closest to and taking up the position as leader.
"A lot has changed," she finally said as they pulled up to their mom's house and Sara put the car in park. "I'll tell you all about it later," She promised before a wicked smile suddenly crept it's way onto her face. "But right now let's see if we can give mom a heart attack."
Laurel smirked at her sister's words but she didn't argue them, she knew much better than to do that by now. So it was with smiles on their faces that the two girls made their way up to the front door of the house and rang the doorbell, admittedly a little apprehensive about how their mother might react to all this.
Within a minute the door opened and suddenly Sara was thinking that she might have jinxed their luck and they may have actually given their mother a heart attack. Dinah opened the door but the instant she saw her daughters on the other side, both of them, she all but froze before their eyes.
"Mom?" Sara asked, no response.
"Mom?" Laurel tried but she had about as much luck as Sara. The two girls looked to each other, as if trying to silently figure out what they should do, when their mother finally reacted… in the form of screaming and hugging.
The rest of the afternoon was spent with Sara and Laurel finally saying "to hell with it" and explaining everything they could to their mother. They decided that since Oliver had revealed Laurel's identity as Black Canary that there was no reason to lie to their mother anymore about the more dangerous aspects of their lives. They didn't tell her everything, obviously, such as anyone else's identity. But it was nice for Laurel to be honest with her mother about where she had been all this time and how the circumstances of her getting there were still a mystery. It was also nice for Sara to be able to come clean to her mother about where she's been as well, or rather, when she's been.
At one point in the afternoon Dinah rushed off into the kitchen to pull her chicken out of the oven (she hadn't planned on having company, so the chicken legs in the fridge was all she had in the regards of Christmas dinner) and that left her two daughters alone in the living room.
"So now will you tell me what's happened on your mission?" Laurel started with a pleading smile; Sara couldn't help but smirk at her.
"Isn't there some kind of rule saying that a person doesn't have to answer complicated questions on their birthday?" She teased and Laurel looked at her with a deadpan expression, to which Sara laughed. "I will tell you everything," she promised, "But not today. Today I just want to be grateful to have you back."
Laurel smiled at her sister's words before throwing her head back with a very overdramatic sigh, "Fine," she drawled out, "But if you're not going to tell me about traveling through time just know that I am going to make mom sing happy birthday to you over dinner." She mocked and Sara could help but laugh at the threat.
"Don't you dare," she said but her words were matched by Laurel's devilish smirk.
"Mom," she called into the kitchen.
"Laurel!" Sara hissed,
"What honey?" Dinah called back, but before Laurel could speak Sara threw herself onto her in a tackle, reaching from behind to cover her mouth but Laurel fought the offending hands.
"Do you have any candles so we can sing happy birthday to Sara?"
With a grunt, half because of defeat and half because of an elbow to the chest, Sara climbed off her sister once the words were said and their mother could be heard rummaging around her cabinets in search of some candles.
"I hate you," the younger blonde mocked and Laurel only smiled evilly.
"No you don't," she mocked and Sara smiled back.
"You're right," she said before tackling Laurel for a second time, this time with a hug that straddled the line of being a chokehold. "I love you," she teased in an almost babying voice. "I love you, I love you, I love you." She continued while Laurel tried desperately to get out of the hold, only succeeding when she eventually toppled them both off the couch and thus forced Sara to release her in order to avoid serious injury.
They were both lying on the floor and laughing when their mother returned, looking none to amused at the sight of her grown daughters roughhousing like children.
"So this is how superheroes get along with their siblings?" She mocked as the girls climbed to their feet.
"This is nothing," Sara assured her mom, "You should see two of the guys I work with." She said, referring to the many sparring sessions between Ray and Nate.
Dinah rolled her eyes at the comment, but dropped the issue and motioned for her girls to follow her into the kitchen. They did so without a word of protest, not even a word was spoken on how their mother had, once again, overcooked the chicken. There may still be a lot of questions that need answering, but for now it can all wait until tomorrow. Today they had Christmas and a birthday to celebrate, something that the Lance women hadn't done together in a long, long time.